Few companies can actually operate as pure-play disrupters at a global scale. Just to be clear, pure-play disrupters are companies such as Uber or Spotify. Even more rare are the ecosystem shapers that set the standards and lead markets creating hyper-scaling digital platforms.

For many companies, digital transformation is often less about a radical rethinking of their business than about figuring out how to leverage digital technologies and tools to better serve customers. In this view, the success of these digital initiatives depends on many key factors. Here you can find some practical insights.

Design since the beginning a clear digital strategy and a transformation roadmap. First of all, you need a clear digital strategy, coherent, and integrated with the overall corporate one that leverages on technologies to foster your business as a whole (both traditional and digital), avoiding launching digital initiatives on the margin of your established business, at the risk of damaging it.

A winning digital strategy should give convincing responses to some key questions about where the most interesting digital opportunities and threats will open up, how quickly and on what scale is the digital transformation likely to occur, what are the best initiatives to embrace these opportunities proactively, and how many and what resources must be allocated in the short and long term.

Furthermore, it is a good practice to use digital key performance indicators (KPIs) that are consistent with both the digital strategy you have chosen and where you are on the digital roadmap.

Invest in the digital capabilities that align with your strategy. The right digital capabilities can help your company keep pace with your customers, as digitisation transforms the way you interact with them throughout the digital journey.

For instance, technical capabilities, such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, or digital content management, are crucial to anticipate emerging patterns in the behaviour of customers and to tailor relevant interactions with them, by quickly and dynamically integrating structured data (e.g. demographics and purchase history) with unstructured data (e.g. social media and voice analytics).

Choose digital transformation leaders who deeply understand the business.

A tech leader may understand how to create a digital business from scratch, but when you launch a digital initiative in an established company, it is more important that digital leaders understand how the business operates, the real needs of the company and the customers, and how to use digital technologies to serve the business. They can hire digital expertise into their team if required.

Start by designing the future state of processes without regard for current constraints.

Successful process automation efforts start with designing the future state of business processes, without regard for current constraints. Once that future state has been designed and convincingly described, the relevant constraints (e.g., legal constraints) can be reintroduced into the processes.

This approach tends to reduce the unnecessary complexity that has often been stratified over the years, taking advantage of digital technologies to reduce costs and improve the customer’s digital journey.

Internal collaboration and teamwork are important in any project. However, a collaborative culture takes on even greater importance in digital transformation initiatives, since they need to integrate traditionally siloed parts of the organisation, from customer service to supply chain management, to marketing, to financial reporting, and to information technology.

As your company develops a collaborative and adaptive culture, it will be easier to participate more meaningfully in broader networks of collaboration, learning, and innovation.

The shaping role in these ecosystems may be beyond the reach of most companies. However, each company can play a value-creating role by performing specific activities (such as production or logistics) within a more broadly orchestrated ecosystem.

This requires a certain level of self-awareness to recognise what your company is good at itself and what others might do better, and to improve your ability to partner collaboratively with other companies and institutions.

Instead of waiting for the launch of perfect conditions for a big-bang product or service and deferring market feedback until then, digital leaders learn, track, and react by putting something on the market as soon as possible.

Then, they gauge interest, collect consumer reactions, and pursue constant improvement.

We need to align the organisational structure according to where you are in the digital path, considering that the core business cannot transform itself fast enough to fully capture digital growth. For example, it is good to develop digital businesses with more mature operations.